The world's best books

by Jay Satterfield

"In October 1930, Macy's department store in New York City used the inexpensive book series "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books" as a loss-leader to draw customers into store. Selling for only nine cents a copy, the small-format modern classics attracted crowds of buyers. Businessmen, housewives, students, bohemian intellectuals, and others waited in long lines to purchase affordable hardbound copies of works by the likes of Tolstoy, Wilde, Joyce, and Woolf. It was a significant moment in American cultural history, demonstrating that a series of books respected and praised by the nation's self-appointed arbiters of taste could attract a throng of middle-class consumers without damaging its reputation as a vehicle of "serious culture."". "The Modern Library's reputation stands in sharp contrast to that of similar publishing ventures dismissed by critics as agents of "middle-brow culture," such as the Book-of-the-Month Club. Writers for the New Republic, the Nation, and the Boo